HISTORY OF COMPUTING MACHINES

Computer machines began as a mechanic and automatized tool to make calculations and processes of big amounts of quantities and data, but what you maybe do not know is that that happened due to the must antique and natural among features of the human being: laziness! From the dawn of civilization, human beings have immersed themselves in creating tools that let them do things more easily, quickly, and efficiently as possible. It turns out that we were not in the mood of doing some additions and subtractions, Blaise Pascal gathered some gears and levers there in the seventeenth century, and now we have a machine that can process -literally, all we can imagine!

Doing some calculations to get mathematical results were, therefore, the main purpose of those original machines that we can name properly just 'calculators'. The abstract of it since then can be described as Input-Process-Output. We enter some numbers into the machine, it processes them, and finally shows the result. That goes from the abacus (500 B.C.E) to the 'analytical machine' by Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century. 

Surprisingly to mention is that one of the biggest contributions to computer development was the loom! You see? Making threads into fabric was one of the most interesting processes ever invented. Looms take as inputs the bare cotton thread and after a long way of ups and down inside the machine the final output is a new fancy fabric for the needs of the fashonists! Until the nineteenth century, it was just a mechanical procedure; the complicated patterns of the design were made manually. Joseph Jacquard invented a method where the latter could now be made automatically: the punch cards. Through cards containing some holes here and there, the machine could 'read instructions' that led it to up or down its gears. Now the machine did by its own what man alone needed to do by hand! Definitely, laziness leads our way out to technological developments! So funny. 

Now, Ada Lovalace saw a different thing, a new approach to what this calculator could perform. She is acknowledged as the first human being to create an algorithm for the machine to read instructions. What she saw was that this computing system could do a lot more than just doing some arithmetic calculations. She saw an all purposes machine. A device to process data to create information. 

It was later on World War II, that Alan Turing deciphered the ENIGMA Machine -a german utility to create encrypted war codes. As BBC puts it: "he invented the idea of a ‘Universal Machine’ that could decode and perform any set of instructions. Ten years later he would turn this revolutionary idea into a practical plan for an electronic computer, capable of running any program" (https://bbc.in/2LMEznH). As we see, he led us to develop both hardware and software that we can consider now as the foundations of modern computing. 

What did happen since then? Well, I believe you know that story well!

#Computers #Programming #History #ComputerScience #Software